... certainly it is not necessary to the attainment of Christian knowledge that men should sit all their life long at the foot of a pulpited divine, while he, a lollard indeed over his elbow-cushion, in almost the seventh part of forty or fifty years, teaches them scarce half the principles of Religion, and his sheep ofttimes sit the while to as little purpose of benefiting as the sheep in their pews at Smithfield.”

Congregations for mutual Edification:—­“Notwithstanding the gaudy superstition of some devoted still ignorantly to temples, we may be well assured that He who disdained not to be laid in a manger disdains not to be preached in a barn, and that by such meetings as these, being indeed most apostolical and primitive, they will in a short time advance more in Christian knowledge and reformation of life than by the many years preaching of such an incumbent,—­I may say such an incubus ofttimes,—­as will be meanly hired to abide long in those places.”

A Reflection on Cromwell for his Established Church:—­“For the magistrate, in person of a nursing father, to make the Church his mere ward, as always in minority,-the Church to whom he ought as a Magistrate (Isaiah XLIS. 23) ’to bow down with his face toward the earth and lick up the dust of her feet,’—­her to subject to his political drifts and conceived opinions by mastering her revenue, and so by his examinant Committees to circumscribe her free election of ministers,—­is neither just nor pious:  no honour done to the Church, but a plain dishonour.”

University Education of Ministers:—­State of the Facts: “They pretend that their education, either at School or University, hath been very chargeable, and therefore ought to be repaired in future by a plentiful maintenance:  whereas it is well known that the better half of them, and ofttimes poor and pitiful boys, of no merit or promising hopes that might entitle them to the public provision but their poverty and the unjust favour of friends, have had the most of their breeding, both at School and University, by scholarships, exhibitions, and fellowships, at the public cost,—­which might engage them the rather to give freely, as they have freely received.  Or, if they have missed of these helps at the latter place, they have after two or three years left the course of their studies there, if they ever well began them, and undertaken, though furnished with little else but ignorance, boldness, and ambition, if with no worse vices, a chaplainship in some gentleman’s house, to the frequent imbasing of his sons with illiterate and narrow principles.  Or, if they have lived there [at the University] upon their own, who knows not that seven years’ charge of living there,—­to them who fly not from the government of their parents to the licence of a University, but come seriously to study,—­is no more than, may be well defrayed and reimbursed by one year’s revenue